The Discovery Phase Is All There Is

Or: Documents Retrieved from the Department of Best Practices, Third Sub-Basement, The Building

The following materials were recovered from a decommissioned Slack workspace. The workspace itself was migrated to a new platform six hours after these documents were created. The new platform has since been deprecated. We have preserved them here for historical purposes. We realize “historical” may not be the right word for things that happened last week. Some of this may be familiar.

I. Orientation

You will receive your Mission on your first day.

This is not technically true. You will receive a Mission. Whether it is your Mission depends on factors that will not be explained to you, because explaining them would compromise the Mission, or because no one remembers, or because the explanation was stored in a system we no longer use.

The Building has many floors. Some are numbered. Some are lettered. Some are named after concepts that were important when the floor was constructed but have since been deprecated. You may hear references to “The RAG Floor” or “The Prompt Engineering Wing” or “The Chamber of System Prompts.” These places exist. They also don’t exist. The architecture is… responsive.

Do not ask for a map. You’ll ask anyway.

Maps are available.

                    THE BUILDING
                    ============
                    
         [Floor 7: Advanced Techniques]
                      ↑ ↓ ← → ↺
         [Floor 6: This floor has been merged with Floor 8]
                      ↑ ↓ ← → ↺  
         [Floor 5: Core Concepts (revised)]
                      ↑ ↓ ← → ↺
         [Floor 5: Core Concepts (original) (deprecated) (restored) (see memo)]
                      ↑ ↓ ← → ↺
         [Loading additional floors...]

The loading screen is a feature not a bug.

II. The Department of Best Practices

The Department of Best Practices is located on the fourth floor, or the seventh floor, or in a shared document that you may not have permission to access.

They issue Memos.

The Memos are very helpful. Last week, Memo #4217 explained the correct way to structure your context window. This week, Memo #4218 explains that Memo #4217 was a test to identify people who follow memos without questioning them. Those people have been reassigned.

Here is an excerpt from a recent Memo:

MEMO #4301: ON THE PROPER USE OF FRAMEWORKS

All personnel are reminded that the approved framework for agentic development is [REDACTED], effective immediately. Personnel who have been using [REDACTED] should transition to [REDACTED] by end of week. Personnel who have already transitioned to [REDACTED] are advised that [REDACTED] has been deprecated in favor of a hybrid approach combining elements of [REDACTED] with [REDACTED].

This Memo supersedes all previous Memos.

I pinned this Memo to my wall. By the time I finished pinning it, [REDACTED] had changed.

III. The Grammar Wars

I was eating lunch (or what passes for lunch in The Building, which is mostly anxiety and the vague sense that you should be spending this time learning something) when I heard the argument.

Two developers, three tables over. One had a badge that said TYPED DIVISION. The other’s badge said DYNAMIC CORPS.

They were arguing about a Memo.

The Typed Division developer slid a sheet of paper across the table like evidence. It looked like a normal Memo, except every word wore a little name tag:

PRONOUN You MODAL should ADVERB always VERB learn TO to VERB pilot DETERMINER your NOUN agent PREPOSITION in DETERMINER a ADJECTIVE low-stakes NOUN environment PREPOSITION before VERB-GERUND attempting DETERMINER the ADJECTIVE production NOUN project. NOUN Wipeouts VERB are DETERMINER the NOUN curriculum.

“No ambiguity,” she said. “Everything is clear.”

The Dynamic Corps developer unfolded his version:

Learn to pilot your agent in low-stakes environments before you bet your week on it. Wipeouts are the curriculum.

“Same instruction,” he said. “Less ceremony.”

She tapped his paper. “People will skim this and misunderstand it.”

He tapped hers. “People will never read yours!”

They almost agreed, briefly united by the doomed impulse to make something other people could follow, then went back to arguing about format.

I wanted to keep listening, but my lunch had been deprecated.

When I came back with replacement lunch, both developers were gone. Gone from the table. Gone from the directory. Their badges were already invalid.

In their place was a new Memo, pinned to the bulletin board:

MEMO #4,218: ON CORPS AND DIVISIONS

All Corps and Divisions have been disbanded, effective immediately.

All Memos are to be evaluated on results, not notation.

This memo supersedes all previous Memos.

On the floor beneath it, I found a scrap of paper. I don’t know which of them dropped it.

It said, in ordinary language, without tags:

Start lower than your fear.
Wipeouts are the curriculum.

I folded it up and put it in my pocket.

IV. The Cartographer

I met a man near the elevator. He was carrying a whiteboard. On the whiteboard was a diagram.

“This,” he said, pointing to the diagram, “is how it all works.”

The diagram had boxes and arrows. Some arrows pointed both ways. Some arrows pointed to boxes that weren’t there anymore and you could see the eraser marks. One arrow pointed off the edge of the whiteboard and continued, presumably, somewhere else.

“I’ve been in The Building for two years,” he said. “I’ve figured it out.”

I asked about the arrow that pointed off the edge.

“That’s the part I’m still working on,” he said. “But once I map it, once I really map it…”

The elevator arrived. It was going up. I got in anyway.

Behind me, I heard him say: “Version 2.0 comes out Thursday. It changes everything!”

I tell him “I hope you’re absolutely right!”. I didn’t mean it to sound dismissive, I truly am rooting for him to make progress on his diagram. I have my own, somewhere. I started over recently. I hope I run into him again soon so I can show him my new v0.1.

V. The Legend of the Complete Map

There is a legend in The Building.

They say there was once a developer who mapped the entire system. Every floor. Every corridor. Every deprecated feature and its replacement and the replacement’s replacement. He wrote it all down in a document so comprehensive that anyone who read it would understand The Building perfectly.

The document was thousands of pages long.

By the time he finished the last page, the first page was obsolete.

So he started again. Faster this time. He automated parts of it. He built tools to write larger and larger chunks at once. He formed a department: The Department of Static Artifacts. They issued their own Memos.

The Department of Static Artifacts still exists. Their maps are beautiful. Accurate to within six hours. No one uses them.

By the time you’ve consulted them, you could have just walked.

VI. The Queue

There is a hallway on the third floor (or what used to be the third floor) where people wait in lines.

The lines form outside doors. The doors have labels:

    ┌─────────────────────────────────┐
    │  NEXT MODEL RELEASE             │
    │  (Changes Everything)           │
    │  ─────────────────────────────  │
    │  Current wait: 2-6 weeks        │
    │  Previous wait: 2-6 weeks       │
    │  This pattern may continue      │
    └─────────────────────────────────┘
    
    ┌─────────────────────────────────┐
    │  THE FRAMEWORK THAT FIXES IT    │
    │  ─────────────────────────────  │
    │  v4.2.1 now available           │
    │  (v5.0 coming soon)             │
    │  (v4.x deprecated upon v5.0)    │
    └─────────────────────────────────┘
    
    ┌─────────────────────────────────┐
    │  COMPLETE UNDERSTANDING         │
    │  ─────────────────────────────  │
    │  Door permanently locked        │
    │  Please see: other doors        │
    └─────────────────────────────────┘

The people in line are not lazy. This is the thing I want you to understand. They are incredibly diligent. They study the door. They read every Memo about the door. They know the history of the door, the specifications of the door, the estimated arrival time of what’s behind the door. I’ve personally waited in these different lines in the past.

They are working very hard.

They are working very hard at waiting.

I talked to a man who had been in the NEXT MODEL RELEASE line for three months. “When it comes out,” he said, “it will change everything. I’ll finally be able to…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. I’ve heard it before. I’ve said it before. I’ll finally be able to really get started.

You know the people I’ve seen actually get somewhere in The Building? They’re not in any line.

I see them sometimes, in the corners, in the empty rooms. They’re building things. Badly, often. Weird little tools that only make sense to them. They finish something, use it for a week, throw it away, build another one.

One of them showed me her toolkit once. None of it was standard. None of it was from a Memo.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” I asked. “Other people build better versions of these. With documentation. With support. With posts on X and Substack.”

She shrugged. “By the time I’ve learned their tool, they’ve moved on to the next one too. And their tool fits their hands, not mine.” She held up something that looked like a cross between a wrench and a question mark. “This fits my hands. I made it last Tuesday. I’ll probably throw it out next Tuesday. It’s fine. I can just make another one.”

The line-waiters have clean badges and comprehensive notes and a clear plan for what they’ll do when.

The builders have sawdust on their clothes and half-finished things in their pockets and no plan at all, just a willingness to make the next thing. Some in The Building dismiss it at synthesis paralysis.

VII. The Singularity Smells Like Coffee

The future never feels like the future when you get there.

The singularity was supposed to be an Event. Capital E. A threshold you could point to. Before and After, cleanly separated.

Instead, you wake up and your coffee maker has a new button. You don’t remember a button being there. When did the button arrive? What does the button do? You press the button and the coffee maker connects to your calendar and refuses to brew until you’ve confirmed your 9 AM meeting.

This seems normal.

This is the singularity. It doesn’t announce itself. It just accretes. Layer by layer. Button by button.

The Building is like this. It changes while you’re in it. If it happened dramatically it would be easier. Instead, the corridors are just different the next time you walk through them.

The coffee is still mostly good at least. The singularity tastes like medium roast with a hint of existential uncertainty, and once you stop expecting it to announce itself, you can actually enjoy the weird new button.

VIII. A Transmission

IX. On the Anxiety

There’s one thing the Department of Best Practices will never put in a Memo:

Frameworks exist because not-knowing is unbearable.

The feeling of standing in The Building without a map, without a guide, without a clear path to your Mission is terrifying. You want something to hold. The frameworks offer this. Some work, for a while, but more importantly they soothe.

It’s a collective coping mechanism. It’s why the people wait in the queues. It’s why I spend some time in the queues occasionally.

But what if the ground moving is just the ground now? And we’ve been calling it unbearable because we’ve been comparing it to a ground that doesn’t exist anymore?

X. How to Walk in The Building

I want to give you a framework. I really do. I know you want one. We all do. But the moment I write it down, it becomes a Memo. The moment you follow it, you’re in a queue for another door.

So instead, here’s what I notice. By the time you read this, it may already be obsolete. That’s fine. Write your own.

As this point, I’ve stopped studying the corridors. The corridors change. Studying them is studying something that won’t exist tomorrow. Instead, I try to pay attention to how they change. More “how do floors move?” than “where is Floor 5.2o?” (Why does a floor have a letter o? I haven’t come across that memo yet)

Every map I followed led me somewhere that had moved.

The doors are real, but what’s behind them isn’t what you think. The NEXT MODEL RELEASE door opens onto another hallway with another NEXT MODEL RELEASE door. It’s doors all the way down.

I’ve started building things I know I’ll throw away. This was the hard one. I wanted to build things that lasted. Things I could point to. But the only things that last now are things I can’t show you. The sense of how corridors move. The feel for when a tool is done. The willingness to throw it out and make another.

Is this advice? Is this a framework? Probably. I’m sorry. The irony is not lost on me.

XI. Departures

I am writing this from the elevator.

The elevator has been going up for some time now. I pressed a button (it doesn’t matter which) and it started moving and it hasn’t stopped. Through the little window in the door, I can see floors passing. Some I recognize. Some I’ve never seen. One floor opened to people sitting next to a pool.

This used to bother me.

The only thing consistent about The Building is the change. At least The Department of Best Practices is still issuing Memos. The man with the whiteboard is on version 3.0 of his diagram. The lines outside the doors are getting longer than ever. Someone, somewhere, is writing a new framework that will be obsolete by Thursday.

But I am no longer waiting for or expecting the building to stabilize. No longer looking for the right floor. No longer in any queue.

The elevator dings.

I don’t know what floor this is. The sign says “(WORK IN PROGRESS).” Below that, someone has written in marker: “looks good to me.”

I step out anyway.

The hallway is unfamiliar. There’s a coffee machine. The coffee machine has a new button I’ve never seen before.

I press it.